Doringo wrote:Here's a cool new idea I had:Jailbreak Metaroom
Basically it's a futuristic prison like metaroom with multiple cells that you have to fill with creatures. Your creatures will have to trigger specific things to escape the metaroom to the DS hub/C3 Bridge I.E flushing the toilet causes something to happen in the other creature's cell, allowing them to trigger some other events.

Once they would get out of their cells, (I don't know to what extent this is possible in CAOS) they would have to do something more complex, like bring an object (Something like a crowbar or lost keys) to another object (the door) or something like that.

The general idea is that you would leave creatures in there in a wolfing-run like way and see how long it takes for them to accidentally solve the entire puzzle.

Essentially the idea of Minecraft's Command Block. You basically have an ominous block/gadget, which appears to be useless on it's own. BUT! You can enter some kind of command/cheat into it and every time it is triggered by the game's logic system (Minecraft's redstone, Creatures' ports) it executes said command.
Optionally one could even implement ways to read the input signals n stuff.

That way, basically everyone could write their own gadgets without much trouble with things like debugging! Using the "CAOS" command (yes, CAOS is a command within CAOS) one could catch errors n stuff like that and make the gadget completely fool-proof.

This would start out with a special egg agent that hatches a facehugger when a creature is nearby... this facehugger will seek out the nearest creature, jump on them and then quickly 'die'... Then there will be an incubation period, after which the 'victim' will die (preferably with a gory animation), and a baby with xenomorph genetics (or possibly xenomorph spliced with the victim's...) would hatch out of the body, preferably with its own set of sprites... Though it would be creepy enough if you just had, say, Grendel sprites and made the xenomorphs and facehuggers target Norns... A baby Grendel (or grorn) hatching out of a dead Norn would give pretty much the same feeling I think...

Really, it could be done with a single agent with a genetics file... The agent would control the xenomorph egg behavior and the 'facehugger' and keep track of 'incubated' victims, and take care of 'hatching' the new xenomorph from their bodies using the genetics file... and the xenomorph genetics could have them with a kind of unknownase chemical in their bodies that the script can use to tell if they are a xenomorph, so it can know how they 'breed'... (besides any other special traits in their genetics... I imagine the things would also normally be quite aggressive, maybe totally carnivorous and/or seeking out victims when hungry and getting hunger reduction from attacking...)

If one gets pregnant and lays an egg, the script can override the normal behavior and make it so that the egg hatches a facehugger and the baby that would have been in the egg comes out of the facehugger's victim's body instead, and as long as the baby has enough xenomorph DNA to have the chemical, it will get to breed the same way... Of course it would be possible to dilute the genes enough so that some will breed normally, and then you could get 'friendly' aliens that don't kill or make facehuggers... You might even have some normal creatures mutate to BECOME xenomorphs, if they mutate to make that chemical.

"For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love."
"We are a way for the cosmos to know itself." - Carl Sagan

There is a command, I think it is called INJR, which lets you specifically target individual organs and inflict damage to them, even up to the point of making them completely useless.

Couldn't this be used as an effective way of neutering creatures you don't want to reproduce (without damaging other vital parts, as e.g. antigenes would)? And if you change your mind, there is still tools like the Inseminator, various cloning devices or ye olde splicer.

Oh, I understood the purpose, I'm just thinking-- I can't see any commands for determining what an organ *does*, so if they got shuffled around, I'm not sure how a script would determine the right one-- or even how a user would, given what script output is there. I don't know much about organs, though.

Usually, people simply go by order. If creatures get custom organs added, they are appended past the brain, to minimize mix-ups.
Of course a duplicated organ gene could mess this up, but by default organ genes are defined not to mutate, only their contained genes.
So if organs mutate, you probably work with something like Nuke or Genocrash Norns, in which case chances are good that your creature is ruined beyond good and evil anyways and you can't do much more damage.

The system actually works relatively well, looking at agents such as the X-Ray V.2.0.

It would be useless for geat-only runs, but how about an agent that makes geats invisible to other geats? is that doable?

I'm thinking it might be handy for worlds where you're doing splicing experiments or wolfing runs with random genomes? The kind where geats sometimes turn up without your notice. They'd be able to see all the other creatures fine (and maybe go mate with them and outbreed) but just not be able to 'look' at each other? c:

I think you can only make creatures either invisible to all other creatures or to none. So if you made geats invisible to other geats, they'd also be invisible towards norns, grendels and ettins.
Additionally, to reproduce, creatures need to interact with each. And to interact they must, well, see each other. Not even amais interracial breeding script would fix this, because they are still invisible to everyone.

An encyclopedia-nornica type teacher for C3/DS.
Or essentially an agent that makes it easy to teach creatures whatever language you want without diving into the game files to change it. (nouns and feelings/adjectives are in different files, plus altering them can cause errors if you're not careful).

You might want to teach creatures a different langauge or dialect for various reasons. Including possibly trying to learn a language yourself, watching how creatures teach each others language.
Maybe the way creatures talk can be a part of a world gimmick or you have a special breed which has different drives or behaviors than other creatures which can be better understood with different words.

I think a force field agent which screens norns according to breed (much in the same way that one of the C3-DS force field agents screens norns according to life stage) might be useful. One way in which this could be applied would be to create sections in a metaroom where norns with Toxic ancestry can go but others can't (since what is good for Toxics is usually bad for other breeds and vice versa). I'm not sure how this would be coded or whether it would even be possible...but I think it would be a good idea all the same.

And even scanning for certain chemicals may be tricky. There is always the method of changing them to have a certain "marker" inside of them that serves no function but being detected, but.... We're talking about already made breeds here. You had to scan for something that they already have, e.g. when you want toxic creatures only, look for a minimum threshold of cyanide.

I don't need to mention that this is obviously... unreliable. There is e.g. breeds which can still die from cyanide, but have a much much slower reaction to it. It might be possible for them to just barely reach the threshold and slip through the barrier, reaching a nasty environment that bombs them with dozends instead of just 1 poison. The other way round it also might be that a toxic norn ate too many healthy things, neutralizing a lot of his cyanide, now looking for some junk to eat again. He would not be able to pass.

The only reliable creature sortings you can do is norn/grendel/ettin/geat, their gender and their life stage.
Actually....... maybe it'd also be possible to look for genetic color variations... Involving the creature history commands, you could make up more criterias, such as a minimum number of children had or a no-imported-creatures-zone.

Egg-sprite variety for eggs created with egg-maker
(it uses the last 6 eggs)
in the same fashion as Housemouse's most excellent
new egg update for the egg-layer.
(It uses the first 11 eggs
of any eggs.c16 listed in it's catalogue file)

One agent which I think we might need for C3DS -- especially given the fact that quite a few metarooms are partially aquatic -- is something similar to the Puffer Fish in C2 which ferries any non-aquatic norns that have fallen into the water back to the surface and throws them onto dry land so that they don't drown. I know from using the Terra Pluvialis metaroom that C3 norns are not smart enough to avoid going in the water if they're not aquatic -- I've seen at least one norn drown itself in Terra Pluvialis.

Yes, I realize that force fields can be selectively used to keep norns from falling in the water until they reach maturity...but it's not possible to use force fields to prevent non-aquatic adults from going in the water, at least not without also preventing aquatic adults from going in the water (which can be equally problematic).

A version of the Cannibalism script that allows creatures to only eat dead bodies.
And more snow-y metarooms? The North Pole isn't good enough for me and Chione is too empty. If you want a suggestion for a name, how about Artic Terrarium?